out of that Aërial mass, conglomerating in its interior, water is separated, and again out of the water the earthy element, and then out of the earthy element, under the effect of the awful cold are separated the stones. Again at some juncture masses of stone, through the momentum of the rotation, are torn away sideways from the earth and thrown into the realm of the hot light Ether; there in the latter's fiery element they are made to glow and, carried along in the ethereal rotation, they irradiate light, and as sun and stars illuminate and warm the earth, in herself dark and cold. The whole conception is of a wonderful daring and simplicity and has nothing of that clumsy and anthropomorphical teleology, which has been frequently connected with the name of Anaxagoras. That conception has its greatness just in this, that it derives the whole Cosmos of Becoming out of the moved circle, whereas Parmenides contemplated the true "Existent" as a resting, dead ball. Once that circle is put into motion and caused to roll by the Nous, then all the order, law and beauty of the world is the natural consequence of that first impetus. How very much one wrongs Anaxagoras if one reproaches him for the wise abstention from teleology which shows itself in this conception and talks scornfully of his Nous as of a _deus ex machina._ Rather, on account of the elimination of mythological and theistic miracle-working and anthropomorphic ends and utilities, Anaxagoras might have made use of proud words similar to those which Kant used in his Natural History of the Heavens. For it is indeed a sublime thought, to retrace that grandeur of the cosmos and the marvellous arrangement of the orbits of the stars, to retrace all that, in all forms to a simple, purely mechanical motion and, as it were, to a moved mathematical figure, and therefore not to reduce all that to purposes and intervening hands of a machine-god, but only to a kind of oscillation, which, having once begun, is in its progress necessary and definite, and effects result which resemble the wisest computation of sagacity and extremely well thought-out fitness without being anything of the sort. "I enjoy the pleasure," says Kant, of seeing how a well-ordered whole produces itself without the assistance of arbitrary fabrications, under the impulse of fixed laws of motion--a well-ordered whole which looks so similar to that world-system which is ours, that I cannot abstain from considering it to be the same. It seems to me that one might say here, in a certain sense without presumption: 'Give me matter and I will build a world out of it.'" 18